Brake Dancing
May. 17th, 2017 01:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ornoth_cyclingHere’s another rule of thumb I’ve developed for endurance cyclists: if you have to use your brake, you’re doing it wrong. That might sound a little silly, but it’s good science.
The only way that a bike moves is through the rider producing the force to propel it. You invest a lot of muscle energy to get the bike up to speed, and then its momentum allows you to keep it rolling along while expending just a little bit more muscle energy. When you stop pedaling and coast, the bike gradually loses momentum and will eventually come to a stop. On an ideal ride, you would only have to produce enough energy for the bike to just make it to your destination.
Since we don’t live in an ideal world, there are times when we need to use our brakes and come to a stop. For the endurance cyclist, stopping and starting is a really expensive operation.
First, the stop. For most stops, a rider uses the bike’s brake, which dissipates the energy built up in the bike’s momentum. That’s momentum that originally came from the rider’s muscle power. When the rider has used more muscle power than needed, he must use the brake to get rid of that excess momentum. Theoretically, he would have been better off expending less energy and coasting to a stop, rather than using too much of his limited muscle power and throwing the excess inertia away.
If you’re just out for a ride around the neighborhood, that’s no big deal, because you’ll never exhaust your stored muscle energy. However, if you’re an endurance rider doing a seven- or eight-hour 130-mile race, running out of energy (bonking) is a real possibility, so conserving every calorie of muscle power is critical.
Then comes starting back up again. As I indicated above, getting a bike up to speed is an investment of energy. It’s costly at first because you’re propelling both yourself and the weight of the bike; however, the investment pays off later in being able to use the bike’s momentum to keep it moving with much less effort. But every time you stop, you use an awful lot of your stored muscle energy getting back up to speed, especially when trying to do so quickly.
There are clear lessons here for cyclists. First, avoid stopping overall, because repeated stops and starts can consume a lot of energy. Second, manage your effort and try to ride in a way that doesn’t require much braking. You might even consider use of the brakes as a warning signal, a reminder that you probably expended more effort than absolutely necessary. I.e. if you have to use your brake, you’re doing it wrong.
Now, obviously the real world is a little more complicated than that. Downhills also put energy/momentum into the system that might need to be dissipated, and road design and traffic control placement usually don’t allow bicycles to gradually coast to a stop. Riders obviously need to apply a modicum of wisdom to these concepts.
But I’ve found it useful, especially on long-distance rides, to be very conscious of how much muscle power I use, which includes riding such that I can avoid using the brake as much as possible.
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